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Quick Tip - Improving thermals on Minisforum MS-A2

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If you own a Minisforums MS-A2, you may have noticed that the system can run quite warm under load. I certainly have been putting my MS-A2 to work by running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and I have been trying various experiments in seeing how I can reduce both the thermals and thus the fan noise, which can get quite loud.

Even after applying the latest 1.0.2 MS-A2 Firmware, which now allows users to control the fan speeds, it did not help as the system was still running too hot. With extensive searching online, I was about to throw in the towel and thats when I came across Chris West's wiki page regarding a temperature fix and his extensive research on his MS-A2 (9955HX).

While Chris's MS-A2 is using the newer AMD Zen 5 processor, I figured it probably would apply to my MS-A2 (7945HX), which has the older AMD Zen 4 processor. I have used the workaround provided by Chris, please see his blog post for full details but by modifying the the TjMAX value from 0 to 78 (Advanced->AMD CBS->SMU Common Options->TjMAX), I have found that my MS-A2 have not been as warm as they were in the beginning.

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My VCF 9 Lab Network Diagram

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During VMware Explore, I had a request from an attendee who was interested in my physical networking and how it is all connected for my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab setup. The network diagram below is based on the following VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM (Build-of-Material) and using the following network configuration with additional commentary on each connection in the write-up below.


Note: All green lines in the diagram above represent 10GbE network connectivity and all blue lines in the diagram above represent 2.5GbE network connectivity.

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Quick Tip - When using self-signed TLS Certificates with VCF Private AI Services (PAIS)

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Like many of our users, I was excited to hear that VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) will now be included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I already had some ideas brewing in my head and I definitely needed to get some hands on!

While setting up some of the requirements for PAIS, I ran into a couple of issues that revolved around the use of self-signed TLS certificates, which is probably common for many of  you, especially in a lab/proof of concept environment.

I spent good chunk of the day debugging the issues, which was not even the worse part, but it was the error messages that we saw. The error messages was not from the product code, but rather the underlying libraries that it relies upon and if you try to interpret the message as-is, you could go down a rabbit hole.

PAIS Engineering is already aware of the issues I ran into, so these will be enhanced in future updates but I did want to share the scenarios in case you run into them while deploying PAIS in your environment.

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